Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by rifung | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

rifung

"Go 1.5 provides support for Android and experimental support for iOS."

I thought this day would never come.

View on HN

It will not come unless Android team changes their mind.

What the Go team is doing is providing the same level of access that C and C++ enjoy.

Which means that outside developing games or writing pure business logic, is all about JNI fun.

I've been using Go 1.4 for iOS development and it works fine. This is just mainstream'ing the support for iOS, which is needed now because things seem to be quite settled.

In fact, I really like using Go on iOS - the ease with which it can be done was astonishing!

As a professional iOS dev and a golang tickerer, I've heard nothing about this, but I'm curious; any projects you can point me at?

I wonder how Go can be better than Swift for iOS development.

I think the attractiveness is that you can share Go code between applications on different platforms, which is not possible with Swift as long as the compiler and standard library is not open source (or generally available).

It may not always be better since you'll likely never be able to call from Go into Cocoa libs, but if you can write a shared library and use it on the server, iOS and Android, then it's a big win. Linking a Swift app against the shared Go library and calling directly from Swift into Go sounds pretty great to me.

>call from Go into Cocoa libs

It can be done, thus:

    #cgo LDFLAGS: -Wl,-U,_iosmain,-U,_PopUpDialogBox

Any developer who wants to do this needs only to create these #cgo statements for whatever Cocoa API they want to use, and they become available from the Go context ..

> It may not always be better since you'll likely never be able to call from Go into Cocoa libs

IIRC, Go can call any Objective-C code through cgo.

I would never exchange the power of a ML based language with first class support from the OS vendor, by Go.

I seriously was wondering if Go would ever replace Java on Android because of legal troubles. I'm still wondering.

That will happen as soon as Android team decides to scrap all development of Android and rewrite it in Go.

It could also happen that ChromeOS and Android merge with Go as native language and HTML5 apps as another first class citizen.

I read in then news that iOS9 will use Swift in some internal apps/libraries too (major internal rewrites?).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com